Lords of Creation

by Frederick Lewis Allen

  Patrician as he was in his conception of organized religion, Morgan nevertheless possessed a simple and genuine faith. When, after his death in 1913, his will was published, newspaper readers who turned to it in the expectation of finding a document concerned only with financial arrangements stood amazed at the mighty declaration of belief with which it began: “I commit my soul into the hands of my Saviour, in full confidence that having redeemed it and washed it in His most precious blood He will present it faultless before my Heavenly Father; and I entreat my children to maintain and defend, at all hazard and at any cost of personal sacrifice, the blessed doctrine of the complete atonement for sin through the blood of Jesus Christ, once offered, and through that alone.”

  The Rockefeller brothers were both prominent Baptists. William gave the church building in which he worshipped in Tarrytown. John was a Sunday School superintendent. His faith, like Morgan’s, was simple and sincere; “I have never had occasion to doubt,” he once said. His piety flowered in a series of munificent gifts. Even as a boy of sixteen he gave nearly a tenth of his tiny income to missions and kindred activities; and in his later years he was a fount of pecuniary blessings to the Baptist denomination, as well as to education, public health, and other worthy causes. (Up to 1928 he had given away in all a little over half a billion dollars!)

  Baker was a trustee of All Souls’ Unitarian Church in New York, a regular churchgoer, and a generous donor (late in his life) to the Washington Cathedral. Stillman attended St. Bartholomew’s Episcopal Church in New York, though not regularly. Schiff attended the synagogue with inflexible regularity, read his prayers every morning, said grace after meals, and refused to have anything to do with business on the Sabbath (a circumstance which, as we have seen, was awkward for Harriman on a certain Saturday in 1901). Schiff aided in the foundation of a Jewish theological seminary; he not only founded but served as chief executive officer of the Montefiore Home for Chronic Invalids, and on his visits to the Home he used sometimes to read the service himself and to preach. His abundant kindliness and generosity were of great aid to Lillian D. Wald from the earliest days of her Visiting Nurses’ Service in Henry Street in the New York slums. On the afternoon of the Northern Pacific panic, Miss Wald had been reading the newspaper accounts of the disastrous struggle in Wall Street and was surprised to hear Schiff’s voice over the telephone, asking her if this was not the evening when he and Mrs. Schiff were to take supper with her at Henry Street; and they came. After his death she wrote of him that “no interests of his business world were ever allowed to supplant his spiritual or altruistic interests.”

  Harriman went regularly to church at Arden, wrote letters to the men of the town urging church attendance upon them, used to walk home from the Sunday morning service with the clergyman and inquire about the mission work and about parishioners who might be in trouble, and established a boys’ club in New York in which he maintained a continuing and lively interest. “He believed in God and he believed in worshipping God,” wrote the clergyman at Arden.

  Many people, aware of the yawning gulf between the prevalent conduct of business in Wall Street and the doctrines of the Sermon on the Mount, have leaped to the conclusion that the religion of such men as these must have been hypocritical: that they assumed an air of piety to curry favor with the righteous or to atone for their business practices. To assume this is to misunderstand completely the men, the atmosphere of the times, and the relation between business and the churches.

  The contrast between faith and works is often striking: between Morgan and Harriman battling for the control of a railroad and there by bringing on a panic, and Morgan and Harriman at worship; between Rockefeller receiving “drawbacks” and driving competitors remorselessly out of business, and Rockefeller picknicking and singing hymns under the trees of Forest Hill with the Sunday School children of the Euclid Avenue Baptist Church. It is perplexing to the student of financial history to note, on the one hand, the prevalence of huge slush-funds for the purchase of votes at Washington and at the state capitals, the hardness of heart shown to unprotected stockholders and bondholders in railroad reorganizations, the fleecing of the public on the exchanges, and the unconscionable profits made in stock-watering operations; and on the other hand to witness the frock-coated gentlemen who were responsible for such flagrant practices attending church and passing the plate and singing “For all the. saints” or “When the roll is called up yonder, I’ll be there”—and believing it, as Mr. Flynn says Rockefeller no doubt believed it.

  It is anomalous to think of financiers worshipping Jesus of Nazareth, the simple carpenter of Galilee, and yet never coming into close human contact, in their mature years, with the workmen in the mines and factories subject to their control, and maintaining an uncompromising enmity against labor organizations. It is even stranger to find some of them assuming that the Lord was their ally in whatever they did, as when Rockefeller said, “God gave me my money,” or as when George F. Baer, leader of the anthracite coal operators in the coal-strike dispute of 1902, sent to a critic of his stubborn attitude toward labor this sublime declaration: “The rights and interests of the laboring man will be protected and cared for—not by the labor agitators, but by the Christian men to whom God in his infinite wisdom has given the control of the property interests of this country.” How can such paradoxes be explained?

  Several things need to be borne in mind if one is to explain them—even after one has made due allowance for the normal frailities and backslidings of mankind, the difference between Sunday resolutions and week-day practicalities, and the disposition of clergy and laity alike to feel that the gift of a new parish house will atone for almost anything.

  In the first place, the Christian religion, as practiced by most of these men, was only partially the religion of Jesus. The Old Testament had a large part in it, and the Old Testament contains plenty of passages which permit the exaction of an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth. Religions tend to take on the color of the communities in which they are practiced; and in the American community other philosophies than that of Christ had absorbed and diluted the Christian teachings. There was the Benjamin Franklin philosophy of frugality. There was the Puritan philosophy of sobriety, continence, and Sabbath observance. There was the laissez-faire tradition of business competition as a hard-fought battle without fear or favor. So completely had such philosophies and traditions been taken into the American blood-stream, as it were, that if an aggressive business man worked hard, saved his pennies, refrained from alcohol and adultery, wore a somber suit to church every Sunday, and put money in the plate, he was well on his way to be a model of Christian conduct. (In the Episcopal Church there was somewhat less emphasis upon a bleak sobriety than in the evangelical churches, but the rest of the formula remained virtually intact.) These were the accepted virtues, and the Bible was an arsenal from which one might select rhetorical ammunition with which to defend them.

  The best of the church-goers of Wall Street probably felt very much as Clarence Day, in his delicious God and My Father, describes the elder Mr. Day as feeling:

  “And nobody could tell him his duty—he knew it without that, it seemed.… It was a code, a tradition. It was to be upright and fearless and honorable, and to brush your clothes properly; and in general always to do the right thing in every department of life.”

  “The right thing to do for religion,” continues Mr. Day, “was to go to some good church on Sundays.” Even in the supposedly wicked metropolis of New York, church-going was in the early nineteen-hundreds a part of the expected duty of the respectable man. The church played so important a part in the community that a substantial citizen ran the risk of being thought a little queer if he did not participate in church activities. The prosperous naturally flocked together in churches where the clergymen—responding, perhaps, to the almost imperceptible pressure of their congregations—took on the color of their surroundings; and the teaching in such churches was not likely to have very emba
rrassing implications. Mr. Day says that his father liked St. Bartholomew’s: “The church itself was comfortable, and the congregation were all of the right sort.… The place was like a good club. And the sermon was like a strong editorial in a conservative newspaper.”

  Yet even if we remember that the religion of Jesus had been subtly altered into something which would have been quite unrecognizable to the carpenter of Galilee, a large part of our paradox still remains. Even a code of simply “doing the right thing in every department of life” can hardly be reconciled with some of the practices freely engaged in by kindly and generous pillars of the church. Other explanations must be sought.

  Bertrand Russell has said somewhere that any man of ordinary sensibility can sympathize with suffering that is visible to him, but only a man of exceptional imagination can be wrung by suffering at a great distance from him. It must be remembered that the damage done in the speculative campaigns of Wall Street, in the watering of stock, in outrageous reorganization plans, in the exploitation of labor, was usually remote from those who did it. When a man unloaded stock upon the public, for example, he did not see his victims face to face. The whole operation, performed in brokers’ offices and reported upon a mechanical ticker-tape, was anonymous and impersonal. Often the damage was remote in time as well as in space: when one looted the credit of a railroad, for example, the result might not be felt for years; indeed, if times remained prosperous it might not be felt at all. In the endless complexity of economic events, how could one say upon whom the responsibility for a future disaster might rest?

  Even more remote from the directors’ conference table than the investor was the laboring man: if mills were closed or wages were cut or thugs were hired to break up a protest meeting in the mining camps, the families upon which the burden of such policies would fall were not as easily visualized as were the boys of one’s little club in the slums. They were very far off, the figures on the profit-and-loss account were very near and very persuasive. When men in Wall Street spoke of Steel, what did they mean? An organization of over a hundred thousand human beings laboring at desks and in mills and in mines, with families to support, rent to pay, food and shoes to buy? Not at all: Steel was a symbol on the ticker tape, it was a counter in a speculative game: something one bought at 48 and sold at 56, something that the Chicago crowd were bulling and the Standard Oil crowd were gunning for. The movement of economic power toward the financial centers meant a movement toward absentee control, and absentee control always tends to be irresponsible, if only because of the weakness of men’s imaginations.

  Enormous allowances must also be made, too, for the sheer momentum of business competition: the fact that in the race for profits one was driven to do the same tricks which the other man did or be beaten. In competitive business, bad practices tend to drive out good. If I don’t buy control of this company, Jones will, and he will milk it: therefore I’d better do it myself and do it quickly. The opposition are trying to bribe the legislators—we’d better get in there first. We can’t afford to be squeamish. Business is business. In the memorable words of H. H. Rogers, “We are not in business for our health.”

  Another perplexing paradox lies in the apparent lack, even among the godly financiers, of a strong sense of public responsibility. Few of the financiers of Wall Street defied the officers of the law as flatly as Rogers, who in the Waters-Pierce case refused to admit knowing where the offices of the Standard Oil Company of Indiana were, and when the prosecutor asked him if he wished to say to the Supreme Court of Missouri that he as a director of the Company did not know where its offices were, replied coldly, “It is quite immaterial to me what the Supreme Court of Missouri desires me to say to them, other than what I have testified.” A somewhat more polite hostility to the public authorities was nevertheless characteristic of the men of the Street.

  Laws, to them, were obstacles to be got around. The corporation lawyer was the efficient pathfinder of circumvention. (Mr. Dooley once said that the corporation lawyer could transform a law which had been designed as a stone wall into a triumphal arch.) Governmental investigations were impertinent snooping-parties to be dodged. The contempt of the financiers for the general public was expressed forcibly in Baker’s remark, “It is none of the public’s business what I do,” and in Morgan’s angry retort to a newspaper man who intercepted him in Paris during the Northern Pacific panic and asked him if he did not owe the public an explanation in view of what had happened: “I owe the public nothing.”

  Here again, however, an explanation is in order. Such acts and statements are not always to be interpreted—though they have often been interpreted—as expressions of defiance to every interest but a selfish one. They must be interpreted in the light of the enduring laissez-faire tradition. The earliest Americans had fled from Europe to escape governmental pressure; the pioneer had been perforce a rugged individualist; the belief had almost inevitably grown up that government interference with private business was the beginning of tyranny, and that to resist the intrusions of government into economic operations was to play the part of a conserver of American liberties. The law of supply and demand offered all the regulation which an American would tolerate. One’s business was one’s private affair, like one’s diet or one’s underclothes. A strange idea, it may seem, in view of the fact that great concentrations of capital could take into their own hands the administration of the law of supply and demand, and that what these men considered their private business intimately affected the lives of millions of men and women. Yet emotionally it was a potent idea. (To some, it still is.)

  Add to this idea the financier’s scorn of politicians as purchasable commodities, as men ignorant of business who inflamed the envious and still more ignorant mob; add to it also a feeling that the man who had won out in the great game of competitive business had a right to the prize, and that those who wanted to change the rules were simply trying to win by cheating; add to it also the feeling that somebody had to rule in any community, and that if the “better classes” had their way, things would be managed with more wisdom and dignity and grace than if the “lower classes” took charge,—and we may understand why even high-minded citizens could quite sincerely view the government and the public as annoying meddlers in matters that were none of their business.

  Yet when all these explanations are made and when due account is taken of the restraint often manifested by the more responsible financiers in the use of their power, one must add: All these were not enough. Through the story of these men’s adventures and exploits there runs the thrill of conflict, of immense tasks boldly accomplished and emergencies boldly met, of a continent subdued to the needs of industry; yet the truly heroic note is missing. The note of self-forgetfulness is missing. The dollar is omnipresent, and its smell pervades every episode.

  The men of Wall Street wanted money and got it. All the explanations and extenuations, however genuine, are but accessories after that fact. One wonders what might have been the destiny of America if men of the majestic force of Morgan, the brilliance of Harriman, the utter concentration of Rockefeller, the generosity of Schiff, had been ruled by the disinterestedness of the scientist in his laboratory.

  5

  In one of the most opulent chapters of his monumental Fifty Years in Wall Street, Henry Clews, writing in the eighteen-eighties, described the process by which Western millionaires were drawn into the social life of New York. Their wives “have of course heard of Saratoga, the far-famed spa of America, and as the fortunes of their husbands mount higher and higher into the millions, they become more and more anxious to see this great summer resort of wealth and fashion. Their influence prevails, and at the height of the season they may be seen at the United States or the Grand Union. They are in practically a new world. There is the rustle and perfume, the pomp and circumstance of the more advanced civilization of the East, and the ladies, with innate keenness, are quick to perceive a marked difference between this gorgeous panorama and the more pros
aic surroundings to which they have been accustomed. As people of wealth and social position, they are naturally presented to some of the society leaders of New York, … who extend an invitation to visit them in their splendid mansions in the metropolis. In New York the Western ladies go to the great emporiums of dry goods and fancy articles of all sorts, to the famous jewelry stores, and other retail establishments patronized by the wealthy. They form a taste for all the elegancies of metropolitan life.…

  “New York … is really the great social center of the Republic.… Here are … mansions of which a Doge of Venice or a Lorenzo de Medici might have been proud. Here are the most beautiful ladies in the world, as well as the most refined and cultivated; here are the finest theatres and art galleries, and the true home of opera is in this country; here is the glitter of peerless fashion, the ceaseless roll of splendid equipages, and the Bois de Boulogne of America, the Central Park; here there is a constant round of brilliant banquets, afternoon teas and receptions, the germans of the elite, the grand balls, with their more formal pomp and splendid circumstance; glowing pictures of beautiful women and brave men threading the mazes of the dance; scenes of revelry by night in an atmosphere loaded with the perfume of rare exotics, to the swell of sensuous music. It does not take much of this new kind of life to make enthusiastic New Yorkers of the wives of Western millionaires, and then nothing remains but to purchase a brownstone mansion, and swing into the tide of fashion with receptions, balls, and kettle-drums, elegant equipages with coachmen in bright-buttoned livery, footmen in top boots, maidservants and man-servants, including a butler and all the other adjuncts of life in the great metropolis.”